Just over a month ago we shared that patches had emerged to support Intel's VA-API in MPlayer and FFmpeg. VA-API supports popular video formats such as MPEG-4 and VC-1 and is able to accelerate IDCT, Motion Compensation, LVC, bit-stream processing, and other functions, but this video API has not picked up much speed yet. The only display driver to have implemented support for VA-API in the hardware is Intel's closed-source driver (the one that's a bloody mess) for the Poulsbo chipset, which is found in a few select netbooks/nettops. However, it is now possible to use Intel's VA-API with NVIDIA hardware (the GeForce 8 series and later) and soon will be possible to use this video API on ATI/AMD hardware too.

Well, I am just hoping Nvidia will make some changes to their driver so cards with only 128MB VRam + turbocache can play HD video.
My Quadro FX 570M (128MB) can play non-HD videos without a problem, but it always gives error 23 (insufficient vram) when I try to play video with 720p or higher resolutions. nvidia-settings does show that this card has 512MB vram(128MB onboard vram + 384MB turbocache, i guess), but it seems the driver doesn't make use of the turbocache.

02-03-2009, 07:23 AM

RealNC

128MB is more than plenty for all kinds of video. I guess there's some other problem and this is just a misleading error message.

02-03-2009, 07:26 AM

Kano

Maybe compiz need lots of vram too the same time.

02-03-2009, 09:31 AM

unix_epoch

128MB isn't really that much when dealing with all of the reference frames you need to maintain for some H264 streams. For example, an unrestricted (i.e. not Level 4.1) 1920x1088 stream with 15 reference frames would use over 60MB just for the reference surfaces (and that's assuming 4:2:2 YUV surfaces -- if they are stored in RGB, it's over 90MB).

What I'm wondering is if VDPAU and/or VA-API support accelerating discrete steps in the video decoding process (rather than full bitstream processing), so that they can be adapted to accelerate Theora and VC-1 on non-VC-1-capable GPUs (plus even my 3GHz dual core can't play a 1080p Theora stream while it can play most 1080p H264 streams).

02-03-2009, 10:45 AM

korpenkraxar

Do I understand it correctly that Nvidia is now actively developing and providing support for all three HD video acceleration interfaces (VDPAU, VA-API & XvBA?), even their competitor's, whereas the fglrx team is mainly farting around trying to fix one more bug than they introduce in each release?

bridgman's support and involvement around here and the potential of the Free radeon drivers are really the only reasons why a sane person should at all consider getting an ATI card, or perhaps one needs to be a little insane to go ATI at this point by the looks of it. I dunno anymore.

02-03-2009, 11:15 AM

bridgman

Don't think so. This is a third party developer layering VA-API over other video APIs so their higher level code only needs to support a single API. Nothing to do with NVidia.

02-03-2009, 11:29 AM

Zhick

Quote:

Originally Posted by korpenkraxar

Do I understand it correctly that Nvidia is now actively developing and providing support for all three HD video acceleration interfaces (VDPAU, VA-API & XvBA?), even their competitor's, whereas the fglrx team is mainly farting around trying to fix one more bug than they introduce in each release?

You got that totaly wrong. ATi (fglrx) only provides XvBA, nVidia (nvidia) only provides VDPAU and the FOSS-drivers (at some point will) provide only VA-API.

This is realy just as bridgman said a developer (who probably isn't involved with any of these) who wrote/will write a backend that translates VA-API-calls into VDPAU-/XvBA-calls.

02-03-2009, 12:07 PM

korpenkraxar

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zhick

You got that totaly wrong. ATi (fglrx) only provides XvBA, nVidia (nvidia) only provides VDPAU and the FOSS-drivers (at some point will) provide only VA-API.

Aha, ok I see. My bad. So what is the difference from the user perspective provided that the back-end implementation works?